What is the most important feature that distinguishes jira from other programs?

[Özge Tosun]

Is there a weak point of jira?

[Deleted user]

@Özge Tosun the lack of project templates as an example, take and go and see for example ClickUP how many it has. Or the other big lack I find is that you can't customise the GUI very often. Jira has had the same interface for practically 15 years.

[Özge Tosun]

thank you for your comment. I am grateful to you

[Deleted user]

@Özge Tosun  

jira is a very powerful tool. Of course nothing will ever be the same as RE: Lotus Domino, but jira is a very good tool. Competing products such as clickup are now very attractive in terms of graphics, but underneath they are still not very suitable for the enterprise sector. You see... if Atlassian decided to update the interface of jira which is at least 10 years old, the product would be unbeatable.

[Radoslaw Cichocki _Deviniti_]

I'd like to disagree on the stillness of Jira's user interface throughout the years. It has changed, and some of the "recent" changes came with Jira Cloud and its evolution. @Rachel Wright wrote about it in Evolution of Jira Design - Part 1.

I see, though, how it may be up to your definition of what "change" means. Maybe it hasn't changed enough for you to consider it a real change. Then it would be the question of why you think it should change more given that the design works for existing users, and seems to attract new ones too.

When it comes to project templates, I think there are more page templates in Confluence then there are project templates in Jira, but I don't see it as a drawback. Jira is so configurable that you can mold it to work in every industry and every segment. Especially with its extending apps.

And once you configure a project that can act as a template, there are many addons that can make your life easier and allow you to replicate your setup:

Delegated Project Creator - empower your trusted users to create or request their own Jira projects based on admin-defined project templates.

Issue Templates - replication of a structure of linked issues from issue templates, including substituting values of variables.

CoJi - publishing of Confluence pages based on what happens to Jira issues (soon it will be able to generate a predefined structure of pages, for example representing full documentation for a new project, if only you represent projects as Jira issues).

[Sedera Randria]

HI @Özge Tosun 

short answer: Atlassian values  

Usually, when users' values are aligned with Atlassian ones,  they find Jira great.

Otherwise, maybe another product will better fit their expectations.

[Aradhana Gupta]

Very Well said @Sedera 

That's been my experience with JIRA. 

Also, I have personally not found another tool, more flexible , intuitive and comprehensive as JIRA..

hence Many may not align to it completely but still use it devotedly :)

[Mike Rathwell]

It is true that the UI on hosted Jira hasn't changed much for many years. If one looks at Jira Cloud, it comes closer to the "large friendly buttons and soothing colors" of some of the non-threatening applications. HOWEVER, having just migrated from hosted to Cloud, while I am exceedingly happy with Cloud function, some of the facility possible coupled with (yes mostly for engineers) shortcuts, etc that no longer exist, Cloud is just not as fast to use since I now HAVE to take my fingers away from the keyboard for many functions.

While hosted Jira doesn't have a lot of the precanned project templates that Jira Software and/or Jira Work Management does, that is also one of its strengths. Just about EVERY precanned template is THAT team's view of what a project of that type looks like. It very well not be MY view of what a project looks like. 

Jira provides the ability to craft a project configuration that suits essentially every part of a given organization. The only reason, in my company, that the Sales team isn't using Jira as their primary tool is because Salesforce does a fine job and I can buy it without building it. The rest of the organization, however, is on Jira and love it. The upshot is that I have a single source of truth for the majority of the organization and each part of the organization can work directly with others across the common tool.

Is there a shortcoming? Yes. It's not easy. You have to think beyond just clicking the buttons to do a Thing when you want it to support all the things. It's complex and it's very easy to build yourself some technical debt. However, I'll take that so that I can craft precisely what I want vs. someone telling me what I want.

[Carla Ann Rowland]

Atlassian Server and Cloud are very  powerful. I have used the product since version 6. What I find explaining is that there is not enough marketing around the flexibility for the tool-- it is viewed as more static--Service Desk Tool or Developers tool. As a Jira Developer/SME I explain how flexible the tool can be it is my job to customize it for my customers--for business processes and traditional software development processes. 

Although cloud is more user friendly out of the box and has built in functionality --- it is a difficult conversion--- functions from server cannot menus change and takes too  long to find the same path for same function or  that capability has been discontinued altogether.

Where the server and cloud configuration tools were parallel aligned in function they have diverged too far.  Moving to Cloud is in some respects is like learning a new tool. This stops clients from converting from server to cloud. Recently I heard one from a former co-worker after struggling to convert to JIRA (3 years) cloud the organization converted back to JIRA Server mostly because the configurations did not talk to each other well. 

This is just a small amount of the client angst that has been shared with me.  Hope this helps.

[Nigel Budd _CV_]

For me the feature that sets Jira apart from others is the flexibility and power of it's workflow engine.  You can do some really clever things with this and bend it around any customer need.

Weakness - I think the dashboards quickly run out of steam and often need to be 'improved' with 3rd party apps.  Another product area that hasn't really advanced in years.